There are of course other methods to perform such tasks, but this really is cleanest way to get a GOG game for DosBox set up, at least in my opinion. Of course, any other method that works is just as valid.

I decided to just explain how to create a shortcut file independent of any desktop environment. I expect most DosBox guides I write will be of this sort as it is for the most part very distro agnostic.

I can give it some thought, I suppose it would all depend on what people would prefer. For most DosBox games all steps are the same, the only real difference will be in the config file for the specific game.

I just created a generic DosBox guide which will be used for the basic setup steps for all my DosBox guides. This guide was shorted to avoid repeating the steps mentioned in the DosBox guide.

This guide flat-out fails for me for HoMM 2 Gold, because it tries to mount homm2.inst as an image file, and DosBox chokes on it.

I managed to work out what was wrong. First, as I wrote before, the image file isn't homm2.inst, it's homm2.gog. Second, my conf file didn't have [autoexec] in it. Now that I've added that, all's well. Thanx for your guide!

homm2.inst is supposed to be mounted as an iso file by dosbox, it is needed for the game audio.

If you can post your entire dosbox config file for Heroes 2 then I can have a look at it.

Since it is a very long time since I played this game, I am currently downloading the newest GOG installer for Heroes 2, and will unpack it and check if things still work as they should on my end. Just to make sure nothing has changed.

EDIT: I just ran the game from the newest GOG installer by my own instructions here and nothing has changed. I suspect there might be some error in your config file. When you post it I will see if I can spot something that would prevent you from playing the game.

I have the game working, with audio, without mounting homm2.inst as an iso. My second post (still waiting on the moderators) was to tell you that I got it working, and that you need to add the line [autoexec] if it's not there.

Your issue with audio is the fact that you don't mount the .inst file. You need to mount the .inst file for audio to work. If you are having problems, then please post your entire config file and I can have a look at it.

This discussion of audio problems started when you referred to my having them, even though I never said that I did, and in fact the audio has always worked Just Fine, as is the rest of the game. Please read over all of my posts on this discussion and you'll see that.

Apologies, I probably should not reply so early in the morning as I apparently can't read properly.

And yes, general audio probably work as well as midi music. But if you want the high quality stereo sound, which can be activated from settings when you are playing a map, then you need to have the .inst file mounted. That is why I kept mentioning audio, I personally can't play the game without the high quality soundtrack.

Anyway, great that the game is working. This is an old masterpiece of a game.

Actually, there's one bit of audio that's off: the background music inside a town. I'll play around with the settings (Dosbox simply won't accept mounting homm2.inst as an iso, and looking at it, it's simply a flat text file.) and see what I can do.

It is odd that you have problems mounting it, because it works without issue for me. Do you use the latest GOG installer and did you extract the GOG installer with Innoextract, or did you use some other method?

Just to double check: the commands for mounting and launching the game, they are copied exactly as specified in this guide? The order of the commands is important, as well as all the options passed to the imgmount command.

I know the homm2.inst is a text file, but it is required for dosbox to be able to locate the music files since the game was originally designed to read the music track on the game disc. I'll be able to do some double checking on my own system later today just to check that there's not something off on my end.

I installed the version on the GOG website, and after finding that it doesn't work under Wine, used your instructions to get it working under Dosbox. (I did make two changes: first, I had to surround some of the paths with quotation marks because they have spaces, and second, once I'd run the c: command, I didn't need to use the path in the imgmount command.) Every time I tried to mount homm2.inst as an iso, I was told that it isn't an image file. And yes, I have the correct options in the right place and order. Checking, homm2.inst is 3.2 Kb and homm2.gog is 280.7 MB.

OK, I finally got it. The name of the file (in Dosbox) is homm2~1.ins, and trying to mount the file using that form of the name worked and got me the missing music. I'm working under Linux, so the long form of the file name probably isn't available. And, I added one more command to the bottom of the section: exit, so that Dosbox closes when I'm done.

That is surprising that you need to use the different form of the name in the config file. I just checked and when viewing the file from within dosbox then it is named as homm2~1.ins, but I have always named it in the config file as written in the guide. I have used the exact same config file on both Ubuntu and Arch.

I got so curious that I decided to do some testing. If I don't specify the full path to the homm2.inst, then I need to use the form "homm2~1.ins", but if I specify full file system path (/home/username/...) then I must use "homm2.inst", perhaps this was the cause of the problems. If you were not specifying the full file system path, then the dosbox naming convention must apparently be used.

And yes, if you have spaces in names then you should put quotation marks around the entire path.